Murray Bookchin's "Recovering Evolution: A Reply to Eckersley and Fox", Environmental Ethics, vol. 12, Fall, 1990 appears in Anarchy Archives with the permission of the author.

Robyn Eckersley claims erroneously that I believe humanity is currently
equipped to take over the "helm" of natural evolution. In addition,
she provides a misleading treatment of my discussion of the relationship
of first nature (biological evolution) and second nature (social
evolution). I argue that her positivistic methodology is inappropriate
in dealing with my processual approach and that her Manichaean contrast
between biocentrism and anthropocentrism virtually excludes any human intervention
in the natural world. With regard to Warwick Fox's treatment of my
writings, I argue that he deals with my views on society's relationship
to nature in a simplistic, narrowly deterministic, and ahistorical manner.
I fault both of my deep ecology critics for little or no knowledge of my
writings. I conclude with an outline of a dialectical naturalism
that treats nature as an evolutionary process-not simply as a scenic
view-and places human and social evolution in a graded relationship with
natural evolution. I emphasize that society and humanity can no longer
be separated from natural evolution and that the kind of society we achieve
will either foster the development of first nature or damage the planet
beyond repair.

I

Robyn Eckersley's "Divining Evolution: The Ecological
Ethics of Murray Bookchin" could have provoked a serious, responsible,
and fruitful discussion between two differing ecological philosophies.1
Social ecology, which emerges out of a classical philosophical tradition,
picks up the organismic thread in Western ontological philosophy that runs
from Aristotle to Hegel, the social tradition initiated by Marx and Kropotkin,
and the historical perspective opened by the age of democratic revolutions.
It tries to advance a definition of nature as and evolutionary phenomenon,
in contrast to the largely ahistorical images that abound in much of the
current ecological literature. Eckersley, on the other hand, is rooted
deeply in the analytical philosophy and particularly in the skepticism
of Hume, and intellectual tradition that leads to a denial of causality,
to empiricism, and ultimately to solipsism. Her view of nature is
basically static, almost pictorial in its one-dimensionality, and her discussion
is formal in its treatment of ideas.

Unfortunately, a full comparison between my views
and Eckersley's is rendered difficult by the account she--and, to some
extent, Warwick Fox--gives of my views. "Divining Evolution" leaves
a great deal to be desired in the way it presents my views. Space
limitations make it impossible for me to correct paragraph by paragraph
the errors that fill her article, let alone Fox's earlier "The Deep Ecology-Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels."2
I would be more that delighted to accept Fox's challenge to discuss our
differences with a responsible, informed, and consistent deep ecology theorists,
but I find that if Eckersley's form of argumentation is to be included
in such a discussion, I will be obliged to devote the greater part of my
contribution to an explanation of what I have actually written, as opposed
to what she and other deep ecologists think I think.

II

Eckersley's criticism rests on an attempt to show that
I believe that humanity should "seize the helm of evolution" and take wanton
command of nature. Thus, he tells us, I "privilege second nature
(the human realm) over first nature (the nonhuman realm)": because
I wish to assert this commanding position of second "over" first nature.3
"The clear message of Bookchin's ethics, then," Eckersley writes, "is that
humanity, as a self-conscious 'moment' in nature's dialectic, has a responsibility
to direct rationally the evolutionary process, which in Bookchin's
terms means fostering a more diverse, complex, and fecund biosphere."4

Later, Eckersley observes that my "anthropocentrism"
is "guided by overarching evolutionary and ecological processes, not the
instrumental needs of humans, and approach that seeks to reconnect human
social activity with the natural realm."5 A guileless
reader might well ask what is so terrible about holding a view that is
in consonance with "overarching evolutionary and ecological processes,"
whether is is mine or not. Apparently, Eckersley labels my view "anthropocentric"
only because it is human beings who happen to be the ones who are involved
in these "overarching and ecological processes."

Eckersley, however, does not permit guilelessness.
"But are we really that enlightened?" she asks.6
Her typical questions--"Why not all...?" and "Can we really be sure...?"--explode
like firecrackers apart from any social context, historical background,
or sense of direction. Here, she follows a typically Humean tradition,
in which one might as well ask,"Why can't elephants evolve into birds?"
or "How can an individual be 'sure' that he or she has any interaction
with external reality beyond the veil of sensation?"

In the world of analytical philosophy and skepticism,
virtually anything is possible if it can be stated consistently, and virtually
everything can be doubted, including the existence of reality itself, if
we remove experience from any historical context. I fail to see why
Eckersley's line of criticism should provide comfort to deep ecologists
who profess to follow Spinoza, Whitehead, and/or Heidegger. Certainly
none of these thinkers would survive her shredder of hows, whys,
and what ifs-bolting as they d from the blue as an infinite number
of ungrounded possibilities and maybes.7

Eckersley's Humean heritage, with its lack of contextuality,
historicity, or sense of direction, serves her well when she asks:

Can we really be sure that the thrust of evolution, as intuited
by Bookchin, is one of advancing subjectivity? In particular, is
there not something self serving and arrogant in the (unverifiable) claim
that first nature is striving to achieve something that has presently reached
its most developed form in us--second nature?8

One could easily turn her skepticism (itself laden with implicit values)
against Eckersley herself and ask,"Can we really be sure that species
have inherent worth?" Certainly, skepticism and the search for an
ethical ground have always been sources of crises in ethics. But
what counts is not simply that an ethics be objectively grounded
(a term I use repeatedly and that Eckersley quotes), but that this grounding
be more that merely intuited and more than simply verifiable in
some positivistic sense or other.9

To follow Eckersley's argument in another vein,
she strongly contrasts my purported view unfavorably with Walter Truett
Anderson's supposedly more reasonable view. She paraphrases Anderson's
view approvingly, that "there is no escaping the fact that whatever we
do has implications for future ecological and evolutionary processes and
that we have been influencing these processes ever since our arrival on
the evolutionary scene."10 Who could disagree? ONe
would suppose from Eckersley's treatment that Anderson is basically a reasonable
man with whom biocentrists could live, while Bookchin is somewhat of an
anthropocentric rogue.

But any deep ecologist who casts Walter Truett Anderson's
To Govern Evolution in a favorable light is naive to say the least,
for Anderson consistently calls for the total remaking of nature--not
merely for "ecological restoration work, as Eckersley suggests. Unhesitatingly,
he approves the use of biotechnology and eugenics and the collaboration
of multinational corporations--indeed, almost every institutional and technological
nightmare that plagues deep and social ecologists alike. Anderson
even disparages deep ecology itself as a "mode of discourse long favored
by intellectuals on the make" who are engaged in a "Holier Than Thou" game.
He dismisses deep ecology as "one strategy for escaping from the human
condition, one attempt to opt out of the collective wrong-doing of the
species. And it reflects a profound bitterness and alienation; behind
the claim of a superior biophilia lurks the old fashioned misanthropy."11

The guiding credo of Anderson's book comes from
a "perspective" that is "strongly and frankly anthropocentric" (in his
own words), apart from some environmental platitudes that acknowledge that
"we are still within nature."12 Near the beginning of
his book, he writes:

The American continent has been transformed; it is now an artificial
ecosystem and it must be managed by human action. This cannot be
stopped, now, nor can we return to a natural order untouched by human society.
We are at the controls whether we like it or not. If suddenly the
human race were to disappear from the North American continent there would
be a period of ecological chaos followed by the emergence of a new balance
of nature. But it would have very little resemblance to the America
that existed before Columbus arrived. And since we do not intend
to disappear and do not know how to live in anything but an artificial
ecosystem, we would do well to confront the fact that we have indeed created
one and now must manage it. We must confront the fact that our "system"--the
whole political/social/economic interaction--must govern the entire physical
space of America, all its water and air and living creatures.13

Deep Ecologists may well wonder what Eckersley finds in this edifying credo
that is worthy of commendation. Deep ecologists who are familiar
with my own writings, moreover, will wonder what she finds in them
on which to base a claim that I--in contrast to Anderson--confer on humans
"a mandate to seize the helm of evolution on the grounds that we have grasped
the direction of evolution and are now ready and able to give it a helping
hand."14

Had Eckersley examined The Ecology of Freedom
in a more than cursory fashion, she would have encountered the following
passage in the opening chapter:

If we assume that the thrust of natural evolution has been toward increasing
complexity, that the colonization of the planet by life has been possible
only as a result of biotic variety, a prudent rescaling of man's hubris
should call for caution in disturbing natural processes. That living
things, emerging ages ago from their primal aquatic habitat to colonize
the most inhospitable areas of the earth, have created the rich biosphere
that now covers it has been possible only because of life's incredible
mutability and the enormous legacy of life-forms inherited from its long
development....To assume that science commands this vast nexus of organic
and inorganic interrelationship in all its details is worse than arrogance:
it is sheer stupidity. If unity in diversity is one of the cardinal
tenets of ecology, the wealth of biota that exists in a single acre of
soil lead us to still another basic ecological tenet: the need to allow
for a high degree of natural spontaneity. the compelling dictum,
"respect for nature," has concrete implications. To assume that our
knowledge of this complex, richly textured, and perpetually changing natural
kaleidoscope of life-forms lends itself to a degree of "mastery" that allows
us free rein in manipulating the biosphere is sheer foolishness.15

Instead of citing this passage, or at least maintaining
a decent reticence in her argument in view of it, Eckersley reproaches
me for holding the very opposite view--and proceeds to refute me by throwing
my own beliefs (many of which go back to my early writings of nearly three
decades ago) back at me. "Ecologists and evolutionary biologists have repeatedly
stressed our profound ignorance of nature's processes," she reproaches
me. "Indeed, the present scale and depth of the environmental crisis
is testimony to how little we know about nature; nor can we afford to dismiss
the possibility that nature is more complex than we can know."16
In point of fact, in the early 1960s, to the best of my recollection, very
few "ecologists and evolutionary biologists" had much to say about the
need to deal with nature prudently because of its complexity, as I was
already saying even then. At that time, there was still very much
of a "gung-ho" mentality of better living through chemistry. Knowingly
or not, Eckersley has taken a free ride on a streetcar that I put into
service as early as 1952 under the pseudonym Lewis Herber--and now she
gallingly asks me to pay for her fare.17

III

Because nearly all of Eckersley's critical comments
rest on this basic misrepresentation, I cannot help by feel that she is
intent on making the worst of any view that I present--even if it happens
to be one that she herself holds, or if not, one that many deep ecologists
hold. For example, nowhere do I ever "privilege" second nature "over"
first nature in the sense that humans have a right to "seize the helm of
evolution." Quite to the contrary, in "Thinking Ecologically," my
concept of second nature resembles more closely the notion of a "fallen
humanity" whose contact with nature must be restored at a fuller level
of mutualistic harmony.18 In that article, much of my
discussion of a second nature (which I call a "warped development"19)
recounts the damage second nature has done to both human and nonhuman nature,
"the massive ecological crisis it has created, and the compelling need
for a "radical integration of second nature with first nature along
far reaching ecological lines"--or what I call "free nature."20

This does not mean that I want to reform second
nature as it exists. Free nature represents the "synthesis" of first
and second nature in a qualitatively new evolutionary dimension
in which "first and second nature are melded into a free, rational, and
ethical nature" that retains the "specificity" of first and second nature
divested of all notions of "centricity" (read: hierarchy) as such.
The concept of free nature is meant to express precisely the "ethics of
complementarity," as Roderick Nash has recently put it in his account of
my views,21 in which human conceptual thought, placed
not "over" first nature but in the service of both natural and social evolution,
forms a new symbiotic relationship between human communities and
the nonhuman ecocommunities in which they are located. This theme
has run throughout all my writings over more than two decades.

Regrettably, Eckersley says nothing about the substantial
closing section of "Thinking Ecologically," in which I discuss free nature,
or the theme of complementarity that runs throughout my work. Indeed,
my advocacy of human ecocommunities that are "tailored to the ecocommunities
in which they are located" should make it patently clear that I am not
privileging human interests over nonhuman ones.22
It is basic to my argument, in fact, that an ecological society, no conflict
need exist between the two precisely because second nature--with its hierarchical,
class, economic, ethnic, and psychological malformations--is transcended
in a harmonious relationship among humans and between humanity and nature.

To examine in detail every instance where Eckersley,
either by omission or commission, misrepresents my views would require
a work substantially longer than her own. Nowhere, for example, do
I clam that my "ecological ethics offers the widest realm of freedom
to all life forms," as Eckersley alleges in her summary. My
claim is far more modest--merely that an ecological ethic would "add the
dimension of freedom, reason, and ethics to first nature."23
Indeed, an ethics based on complementarity would place a constrictive burden
on the egoists, the corporate profiteers, and the predatory developers
who claim their "freedom" to exploit the natural world in the name of rugged
individualism.

In another, rather puzzling example, Eckersley claims
that "nowhere" do I "specifically" define the terms "individuation and
freedom or selfhood."24 Nearly all my works--and particularly
The Ecology of Freedom--contain such definitions. Page 148
of the latter work explicitly defines "the equality of unequals" as a minimal
form of freedom, in contrast to justice, or the "inequality of equals."
Two lengthy chapters, "The Legacy of Freedom" and "The Ambiguities of Freedom"--not
to speak of the closing chapter,"An Ecological Socity"--all focus on the
history of freedom, the ways in which it has been defined, the problems
it raises, and the ambiguities that beleaguer it. Indeed, it is difficult
to read a single one of my theoretical works without encountering definitions
of freedom and histories and analysis of institutional forms of freedom25

Because Eckersley is concerned about precise definitions,
I feel obliged to turn to ask her about hers. What does she means
when she approvingly writes that in a "biocentric orientations...bumans,
like any other organism, are recognized as special in their own unique
way and are entitled to modify the ecosystems in which they live in order
to survive and blossom in a way that is simple in means and right in ends"?26
This mouthful of vague metaphors can be interpreted quite validly in an
endless variety of ways. What does she see as "special" about human
beings, and in what ways can their "uniqueness" be expressed? Who
has "entitled" them to modify these ecosystems, if not human beings themselves,
with rights that they (anthropocentrically?) accord to themselves?
What "means" should they use, by what biocentric standards? To what
"rich" ends should they aspire? How does Eckersley define simple
and richness?

Eckersley invokes Donald Worster's curious observation
that ecological ethicists "picked out their values first and only afterwards
came to science for its stamp of approval."27 But this
is as disparaging of ethicists as a complaint that scientists form their
hypotheses first and only afterward turn to nature for supportive data.
The rather simple empiricist assumption that facts alone give rise to ethics
and scientific theories--indeed, that we simply build up our generalizations
from building blocks called "brute facts"--is surely as naive philosophically
as it is unreflective intellectually. One wonders what Charles Darwin
was doing when he sailed to the New World on the Beagle with a storm
of evolutionary theories bouncing around in his head, including those of
his grandfather, Erasmus. Are we to disparage his theory of evolution--or
a theory of ecological ethics--because facts are "selected"

to support a hypothesis? The question that is really at issue
is not the selection of data to support a hypothesis, but whether the hypothesis
is adequately supported by data--and, philosophically speaking (as
I argue later), what is meant by adequate.

No less disconcerting is Eckersley's use of double
standards to criticize many of my ideas. Although she exhibits deep
concern about the problem of defining "limits" on human intervention in
nature when it comes to my views, she never troubles Walter Truett Anderson
with this problem, and she places not the least qualification or limit
on her own vague metaphors, apart from the maxim, "Live simply that others
may simply live." Alas, if Herbert Spencer's concept of "survival
of the fittest" could be a "good and true path" in evolutionary
development among many, as Eckersley suggests, we are indeed faced with
considerable confusion.28

Another double standard can be found in her accusation
that when I make use of a traditional analogy, notably the development
of a tree from a seed to maturity, I collapse "ontogenetic development...into
phylogenetic evolution."29 When Arne Naess uses freewheeling
expressions like "biospherical egalitarianism" radically to delimit human
intervention into nature, Eckersley, instead of taking him to task for
imprecision or for using sweeping metaphors that carry him from the natural
to the social domain without qualifications or transitions, accuses his
critics of being "over literal."30 For Eckersley
to focus on analogical statements in my writings while exculpating deep
ecologists who serve up a menu of the most mixed, confused, and even anthropomorphic
metaphors is an extraordinary example of the pot calling the kettle black.

Eckersley's polemical zeal gets a bit out of control
when she even impugns diversity as a desideratum--apparently as long as
I favor it.31 Ironically, apart from agriculture,
nowhere have I argued that diversity should be "managed," although I frankly
fail to see what is wrong with fostering diversity if we are, in fact,
to restore ecocommunities that have been virtually denuded of complex food
webs. Nor do I offer any "troubling scenarios for those concerned
with native ecosystems" (whatever the word native means today, given
the vast alterations that have been made over past millennia by natural
as well as human activity). Certainly I nowhere promote the virtues
of logging roads, clear cutting, and the like. Contrary to misleading
characterizations of me that have been made by some Earth First!ers and
deep ecologists, I have militantly fought logging, clear cutting, and even
fairly minimal efforts to disturb "native" ecocommunities for the greater
part of a half-century.

Eckersley's polemical zeal reaches it acme when
she criticizes such relatively minimal practices as permaculture for being
anthropocentric on the grounds that permaculture selects species that are
needed for human nutrition at the expense of native life forms and thereby
dislocates "native" habitats. What, if you please, is food cultivation
all about? By this logic, bears are being Ursidae-centric when they
paw into beehives and gorge "selfishly" on honey without regard to the
"intrinsic worth" of the bees, not to speak of their crucial role in many
ecocommunities. If even permaculture is anthropocentric in Eckersley's
eyes, are human beings to be criticized for interfering even on a minimal
basis with other life forms in order to maintain themselves? In that
case, Walter Truett Anderson my be quite justified in claiming that behind
this kind of "biophilia" lies a good "old-fashioned misanthropy."32

IV

Finally, Eckersley expresses solidarity with Warwick
Fox in attempting to dissociate human efforts to "dominate nature" from
their roots in social development. Together they "refute" an important
connection that I have made by obscuring my distinction between ideology
and reality on the one hand by making out to be a determinist on the other.

I do not know how often I have to repeat that there
is a distinction between the idea of dominating nature--an ideology--and
actually dominating nature. The domination of nature is an oxymoron
that is absolutely impossible to achieve if only because all phenomena
are, in a broad sense, "natural." Eckersley, however, ignores the
fact that my writings focus on the idea of dominating nature, not
on the actual dominating of nature, which I repeatedly, indeed emphatically,
claim is impossible. Thus, she demands early on in her piece, "How
far does [Bookchin] go in challenging the human domination of nature?"33

The distinction between "dominating nature" and
the idea of dominating nature is not an idle one. I am not
concerned exclusively with whether a given society (be it hierarchical
or egalitarian) actually damages the ecocommunity in which it is located;
I am also concerned with whether it ideologically identifies human
progress with the idea of dominating nature. I am concerned,
in effect, with a broad cultural mentality and its underlying sources--notably,
the projection of the idea of social domination and control into nature--not
with transient behavior patterns that come or go as a result of opportunistic,
often historically short-lived circumstances. Under capitalism (corporate
or state), the idea of controlling nature is a deeply systemic
factor in social life--although this ideology, I may add, can be traced
as far back as Aristotle's justifications of slavery around 350 B.C.E.
in the West and to Hsun Tzu's realism circa 298 B.C.E. in the East.

* Institute for Social Ecology, Plainfield, VT 05667. Bookchin
has written, lectured, and taught on the relationship of social to ecological
issues since 1952. He is the author of fourteen books, principally
on the social ecology, ecophilosophy, and eco-anarchism. His most
recent books include The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Cheshire Books, 1982), Remaking Society (Boston: South End Press,
1989), and The Philosophy of Social Ecology:" Essays on Dialectical
Naturalism Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990).

6 Ibid., p. 115. My use of the term second
nature has a sharp critical thrust as well as an evolutionary one.
Of course, we are not enlightened today-which is precisely the reason why
I believe that it is imperative that we advance toward an ecological society
or "free nature." Even if we were to make this advance, it would
be an essential part of my view that first nature is far too complex to
be dealt with in anything but the most prudent manner. See below,
where I criticize Eckersley for completely misunderstanding my view of
second nature and its inadequacies.

7 I would think deep ecologists of, say, the Spinoziastic
variety would feel a stronger affinity with my commitment to organic entelechies
and dialectical reason than to Eckersley's proclivity for propositional
analysis and formal logic.

9 By using the term grounded in relations to ethics,
I am trying to say, following a long philosophical tradition, that values
are implicit in the natural world, not that first nature is an arena for
ethical behavior. There is no ethical nonhuman nature as such.
To validate this point would require a full-length article in itself.
The difficulty deep ecologists are likely to have with my view that ethics
is "grounded" in nature stems from the static image they have of nonhuman
nature. Accordingly, from their standpoint, nature either "is" or
"is not" an arena of ethical action. That it can be a nascent arena
for the emergence of ethics seems beyond them. By contrast, my view
is evolutionary-that is, I am concerned with how an ethics evolves through
the gradual emergence of human agency over aeons of evolutionary development.
Insofar as the evolution of human beings from a nonhuman nature is simultaneously
a continuum and and disjunction, one can argue philosophically from
a developmental viewpoint that the human ability to function as moral agents
has its objective origins in their evolution from nonhuman nature.
Hence, nowhere do I speak of an "ethics in nature" but rather of a nature
that forms the ground for a human ethics.

25 By the same token, I fail to see how Eckersley
can claim that I essentially ignore wilderness (ibid., p. 112, n. 49).
She makes this claim exclusively about my essay "Thinking Ecologically."
One would almost suppose that this essay was the only work of mine she
scanned. The ecology of Freedom, for example, contains a pointed
critique of domestication and its shortcomings (pp. 278-80). I praise
Paul Shepard, in turn, quite extensively and quote him on his defense of
wildness and wildlife, as against the myth of a "pacified" nature and the
tragic emphasis of "civilization" on the domestication of life forms in
an "overly administered and highly rationalized" society.

28 One finds similar double standards in deep ecology's
one-sided treatment of philosophers and philosophical traditions.
Spinoza, for eample, is cast frequently as a nouveau Taoist and is interpreted
more in the romantic tradition than in the scholastic one to which he has
more affinities, despite his many differences with medieval thinkers.
That this great thinker was militantly anthropocentric is consistently
ignored by deep ecologists, as far as I have been able to ascertain.
I have yet to encounter any attempt to explain Spinoza's extraordinary
statement:"Besides man, we know of no particular thing in nature in whose
mind we may rejoice, and who we can associate with ourselves in friendship
or any sort of fellowship; therefore, whatsoever there be in nature besides
man, a regard for our advantage does not call on us to preseve, but to
preserve or destroy according to its various capabilities, and to adapt
to our use as best we may." Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, appendix, paragraph
26, in The Chief Works of Benedictus de Spinoza, vol. 2, trans.
R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 241. The
accuracy of this translation has been carefully checked against the original
Latin text.